Speculative Design

Named, together with Research through Design (RtD) and Design Fiction, as a methodology for future exploration — a key source of Variation that deliberately introduces novel possibilities and critiques into the design knowledge pool. Elsewhere framed alongside backcasting and scenario planning as an essential future-oriented procedure, "designed to explore and shape potential futures rather than just react to the present," and as a form of observation oriented towards understanding and interrogating potential future contexts, systematically gathering and interpreting signals from the present to construct plausible, possible, or provocative narratives about what might lie ahead.